Tinkoffs adds voice assistant to Clubhouse, grows 21% in 2020

By Sunniva Kolostyak

Russian financial services provider and challenger bank Tinkoff, has integrated its assistant Oleg into Clubhouse, making it the first voice assistant, speech recognition and synthesis solution available in the popular audio-chat social network.

Oleg will be a full-fledged user helping room creators to communicate and moderate discussions in Clubhouse utilising its text-to-speech and speech-to-text capabilities (Tinkoff VoiceKit) in real time. Tinkoff’s voice assistant will be able to enter rooms, transcribe speech in real time, and stream the text in his Oleg in the Clubhouse Telegram channel. The assistant can also moderate Clubhouse rooms, voice questions to speakers, remind users about time limits, regulations, and so on.

Oleg made his debut appearance in Clubhouse, the invite-only audio app, on 11 March. It converted speech to text, streaming the results from the Tinkoff Investments room where Tinkoff Group CEO Oliver Hughes and other senior executives held a conference call to discuss Tinkoff Group’s financial performance and record net profit in 2020.

In Tinkoff Group Holding’s financial results for the three months and twelve months ended 31 December 2020, the group’s revenues grew 21 per cent to RUB 195.8 billion in the financial year 2020, and net profit rose 22 per cent to a record RUB 44.2 billion.

Dual-listed in London and Moscow, its return on equity (ROE) remained above 40 per cent in 2020, and non-credit business lines, such as the Tinkoff Investments brokerage platform, Tinkoff Business serving SMEs and Tinkoff Acquiring, helped fuel profitability with a record 37 per cent of revenues and 37 per cent of net profit.

Its total customer base expanded further, reaching 13.3 million in 2020, compared with 10.2 million in 2019.

Commenting on the results, Oliver Hughes, CEO of Tinkoff Group, commented: “Despite its challenges, 2020 proved to be yet another year of record profit for us – we reported net profit of RUB 44.2 billion, beating our full-year guidance. Tinkoff was quick to adjust to changing consumer preferences, which helped both our credit and non-credit business lines go from strength to strength.”

“We retained our strong growth momentum with the total number of customers reaching 13.3 million, up from 10.2 million a year ago. This solidified Tinkoff’s position as Russia’s third-largest bank by the number of active customers and its largest digital-only player in the financial sector. This puts us firmly on track to expand our customer base to more than 20 million over the next three years. Our engagement with each customer continues to deepen, with average products per customers growing from 1.3 at the end of 2019 to 1.4 at the end of 2020, despite strong growth of the customer base.”